There is a well known bill discriminating and counting apparatus, in which bills having mixed denominations are collectively received from a hopper, the bills are fed and carried one by one, the bills are counted while the denomination and authenticity of the bills are discriminated, and the total amount of the normal bill or the number of bills in each denomination is counted and displayed (for example, see Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2003-296801).
A structure and an operation of a conventional bill discriminating and counting apparatus will be described with reference to FIG. 1. FIG. 1 is a longitudinal cross-sectional view showing an internal structure of the conventional bill discriminating and counting apparatus.
A feeding roller 5 feeds the bill placed in a hopper 1 to a transport path of the bill discriminating and counting apparatus, and the bill is carried by plural carrying rollers 6.
During the bill carrying, the bill passes through detection sensors 7a and 7b, and a bill discriminating sensor 8 discriminates the denomination and authenticity. Then, the bill passes through a detection sensor 7c, and the bill is received between blades of a rotating impeller 9 when the bill is normal, and the bill is aligned and collected in a stacker 2. On the other hand, when the bill discriminating sensor judges that the bill is a forged bill, a solenoid 10 is operated to move a branching pawl 11 downward, and the bill is delivered to a rejection section 3.
The numeral 4 designates an operation and display section which performs various settings in performing the bill discriminating and counting process.
Conventionally, sometimes a bill credit processing apparatus used in a teller's window of a bank is installed and commonly used between two tellers, and the two tellers can operate the bill credit processing apparatus from both sides through a teller's machine which is of an upper-level apparatus.
In the conventional apparatus, because it is necessary that the bills sequentially put in the hoppers by the right and left tellers be counted and stored without mixing the bills, it is necessary that the apparatus be set in the state occupied by either of the tellers in each transaction from the beginning to the end.
However, when the apparatus is continuously set in the state occupied by one of the tellers until one transaction is ended, the other teller cannot perform the counting and storing operation with the apparatus, even if the counting and storing operation is interrupted by some reason. When the other teller uses the apparatus, because it is necessary that the interrupted process be reset to switch the apparatus to the state occupied by the other teller, the process initially performed by one of the tellers is wasted.
Therefore, the conventional apparatus has a problem on working efficiency. In consideration with these problems, there is proposed a bill credit processing apparatus having a function in which the two tellers can use the one apparatus (for example, see Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 7-118032).
The bill credit processing apparatus disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 7-118032 is specialized in the apparatus which is commonly used by the bank tellers, the bill credit processing apparatus is located under a teller's machine occupied by each teller, and the occupation state is switched by the teller's machine.
However, in the conventional bill discriminating and counting apparatus, the occupation is not determined by an instruction from the upper-level apparatus such as the teller's machine, and originally the one teller uses the one bill discriminating and counting apparatus from a commonsense standpoint. Therefore, design is not made such that the two operators can commonly use the one apparatus. Accordingly, in a store or a financial institution in which the bill discriminating and counting apparatus is used, it is necessary that the number of bill discriminating and counting apparatus be required as many operators as there are, which results in a problem from the standpoint of capital investment.